Todd Walton: A Person Here, A Person There

I keep forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering how things work in this universe for the likes of me, speaking of how best to go about sharing my writing and music with others. I think the reason I keep forgetting is that my ego keeps taking over to get us through certain parts of the process, but then years go by before my ego quiets down enough for the higher self to be heard. If that makes sense to you, we are kin.

Walking to and from the village provides me with an excellent vantage point for considering my role in the larger scheme of things, and not long ago while climbing the steep hill to home I solved a nagging emotional and strategic dilemma I’d been wrangling with for years—the solution provided by the juxtaposition of me walking up the hill while dozens of cars driven by versions of me zoomed by.

The dilemma I solved has to do with recent techno-digital changes that have radically altered the ways in which music and writing and visual art can be made available to the world, and how, as these technological changes have become more and more well-established, I have felt I should be availing myself of these new fangled modes of delivery in order to share my work with others. Note the word should. Aye, there’s the rub.

For instance, because it is now possible to write something, anything, a page of unedited doggerel or a reimagining of Goethe’s Faust without verbs, and upload said writing to any number of verbiage-spewing websites to sell or give away, that is what millions of people are doing and what many people tell me I shoulddo with my writing. These same people say that once I have uploaded my novels and stories to these verbiage-spewing sites, I should join Facebook and tell my friends to tell their friends to Like my verbiage so people will download my writing to their pads or readers or phones. Why wait, they say, for some old-fashioned publisher toLike my verbiage? Just spew, digitize, upload, and hope to go viral.

These same people and other people, too, tell me Ishould record my music on Garage Band and upload everything I record, even junky noodling around, to a cloud thing connected to sites I should then constantly Twitter about so people will upstream my music and Like it and have their friends go to my Facebook Store to download my music on their iPods and add those tunes to their Pandora options request queue or something.

But for some reason I cannot bring myself to join Facebook or Twitter, or to learn how to use Garage Band or to learn how to digitize my verbiage. The thought of doing so fills me with the same dread I feel when I imagine trying to cross the Grand Canyon on a tight rope. Am I being irrational? That depends on your definition of rational. I do know that in order to make the recordings I want to make, I need Peter Temple to use his excellent microphones and expertise to record my piano in my living room. Maybe I have a personality disorder, but I consider my successful use of email a major accomplishment.

And as I was walking up the hill and feeling fine to be walking rather than piloting a hurtling mass of steel, I thought, What is the equivalent of walking when it comes to sharing my writing with others? Photocopies. What is the equivalent of walking when it comes to sharing my music with others? Making an album with Peter Temple at the controls and pressing a few hundred CDs.

Making three-dimensional artifacts is what I am comfortable and happy doing. If Universe wants to upload my creations to the global digital realm, she will send people with the requisite skills to do that for me. She has already done that for some of the things I’ve created, and she hasn’t yet sent anyone for other things I’ve made. So be it. In any case, I shall henceforth no longer be weighed down to the point of dysfunction by these damnable shoulds, and I will have goodies to share with people who want those goodies. What a relief.

To that end, I went into ZO, Mendocino’s finest and only copy shop, and consulted with Ian, the maven of duplication, about making an elegant comb-bound photocopy edition of my novella Oasis Tales of the Conjuror (with illustrations by the author) to get a sense of how much such copies would cost me, which would help me figure out how much to sell them for via my web site and P.O. Box. The copies will be extravagantly signed and numbered, which will add to their inestimable value. I should have done this when I finished writing the book a few years ago, but I got so derailed by those aforementioned shoulds, that the handful of people I know will want the book have had to wait all this time for my higher self to wrest control of the steering wheel.

Speaking of happy, this AVA article is my 250th for the esteemed journal, and I know I would not have written any of these epistles if they did not first appear in newsprint before I load them onto my web site blog. That said, no one has ever offered me money, serious money, to write for an online publication, and I suppose if someone offered me more than a pittance, I might be tempted, whereas I have gladly written thousands of articles and stories for pittances for three-dimensional publications. What’s my problem? Why can’t I get with the times? I dunno.

The title for this article, A Person Here, A Person There, came from my dear friend Max Greenstreet. During a recent email exchange, I told Max about the occasional outbursts of web site orders for my obscure little bookOpen Body: Creating Your Own Yoga. These orders come from Australia, New Zealand, Finland, England, Sweden, Canada, and even sometimes America, a person here, a person there, as Max put it, wanting to buy Open Body from me despite the international postage being twice what I sell the book for.

The reason for these occasional outbursts of interest inOpen Body is a perfect case in point about how best to go about sharing my writing and music. To make a long story short, some fifteen years ago, after a number of friends asked me for guidance in dealing with their chronic aches and pains, I made a little book about how I deal with the pain and stiffness that have accompanied me since I was a teenager. I made ten photocopies of the little tome, called it Open Body: Creating Your Own Yoga and gave the copies to friends as Christmas presents. One of the friends showed the booklet to a literary agent who contacted me and said if I would double the number of words, she would try to find a publisher for the little tome.

I expanded the book, appended inspiring figure drawings by my friend Vance Lawry, and the agent sold the book to Avon for ten thousand dollars, six for me, four for Vance. I was stunned by this turn of events, never having published a book of non-fiction and knowing little about the formal practice of yoga. Then, as with all the books I’ve ever published with big New York publishers, the villains in Sales got a whiff of the project and decided to kill the book. Open Body was remaindered—taken out-of-print—three months beforeit was published, and I was given the opportunity to purchase a few boxes of the book for a dollar each, which easily beat the cost of photocopying. Thus despite the premature death of Open Body, I ended up with a neato artifact at no cost to me beyond the emotional anguish of dealing with corporate morons who have made of our culture a wasteland.

Now here’s the fun part. Before the Sales cretins at Avon aborted Open Body, the young Avon editor who bought the book in the first place, sent the manuscript to Donna Farhi, a world-renowned yogini and yoga teacher, and she loved the book and gave us a rave blurb that appears on the book. And to this day, Donna reads from Open Body at workshops she gives in New Zealand and Australia and around the world for yoga teachers and zealous yoga practitioners, which readings result in occasional inquiries from people who want to buy new and signed copies of the book from me rather than used copies for pennies from online booksellers. A person here, a person there. Donna is also a fan of my piano CDs and frequently plays them at her workshops, so I occasionally sell a few of those to her followers in the form of actual CDs or as…downloads!

Having escaped once again from those terrible shoulds, I will soon be sending out notices of the photocopy publication of Oasis Tales of the Conjurer and the arrival of my new piano CD Incongroovity, featuring the groovacious song Real Good Joe. If you would like to be on my mailing list, please email me at my web site or send a note to P.O. Box 366, Mendocino, CA 95460. What fun!

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser October 2013)
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2 Comments

The body has a natural yoga that it creates for the needs in present time by using the breath to access relaxation and the central nervous system. The yoga is automatic and needs no direction but the breath and relaxed body. If one relaxes enough, and breathes in each body parts as needed, one will access this wonderful automatic flowing movement without learning 3000 year old yoga postures. I have nothing against proper yoga disciplines, but by relaxing enough to let the body tell you what it needs in real time is the original yoga.

I think you’re right, Wayne. I wrote Open Body for people who were either hurt or intimidated by formal yoga practice, as I was, to encourage them to relax sufficiently so they might feel what their bodies are asking for. Yoga postures, the old ones and the new ones, are only good for us if we’re relaxed enough to benefit from them.

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Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

What is not worth doing, is not worth doing well. ~Abraham Maslow

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

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Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~ Cicero